Here are the ways I have imagined Honey dying: she stands up on a chair and the chair tips back and crashes through the window and the glass shatters and pierces her throat. She stands up on a chair and the chair tips back and crashes through the window and she falls two stories and shatters on the pavement. She darts out into the street like a panicked cat and gets crushed by a bus. She strangles in the blind cords. We fly to Turkey and someone blows a hole in the fuselage or the pilot reaches the nadir of a years-long spiritual torment and drives the plane into a mountainside or the pitot tubes freeze up and the inexperienced pilot who knows something is wrong is overruled by his imperious boss who was in the bathroom and has no idea what the fuck is going on but always has to have the last word and the plane speeds into the ocean. I give her a tortilla and she folds it up and crams it into her mouth all at once and stops breathing. The ceiling fan comes loose from its 1920s moorings and crushes her skull while she eats breakfast. We visit my father-in-law and he doesn’t pay attention and she is swept away by the sea. We go anywhere and I don’t pay attention and someone spirits her away. I go to work and forget to bring her to daycare and she roams the house screaming until she falls down the stairs and breaks her neck. I go to work and the Big One hits and I can’t get home to her and she dies in the wreckage of her daycare with all the other babies. We go to Istanbul and some demented widow from Dagestan blows herself up and Honey is scattered across the pavement. We stay here and she goes to school and some demented teen takes his dipshit mother’s unsecured assault rifle and fires rounds and rounds of bullets into her body and her classmates’ bodies. She rides a bus across Bulgaria and the bus veers off the road and flies into a concrete barrier. Her cells suddenly decide to murder her with mad replication. She gets in a taxi outside of Diyarbakır and a van crosses the median. Why did I have a child? To have a child is to court loss.
DAY 6
For some reason I wake up on my own at 5:00 a.m. exhausted but alert. I go in the closet and look at Honey who is sleeping peacefully with her hand over her head, the Band-Aid brown with dried blood, and I go onto the porch with a cigarette. It is a breathtaking Paiute morning, the air is so cool, so thin that the call of a bird or a human voice would carry the hundred miles to the place where the mountains rise out of the plains. The sky is streaked with pink and the smell of juniper is tempered with some other freshness, some hint of a cooler season to come. There are three deer in Cindy’s yard, picking their legs through the damp grass with grace that belies their witless expressions. I sit for a minute and feel the whole-body feeling of place-love, and the smoke from my cigarette lingers discreetly in the morning air.
But then I come back to earth and it is Monday and obvious that I am going to have to do something regarding my place of work and explaining why I am not at it, in addition to my potentially lost income of $69,500 which is my family’s primary income. What is interesting is that under normal circumstances examining our finances and being hyperaware of every sum available to us is one of my primary interests and hobbies in life but in the past six days I have assiduously avoided thinking about it at all, namely the fact that $1,700 is due for our apartment and $1,100 for daycare, both of which are far below the market rate and contingent on the health and/or goodwill of the price-setters, which could change at any moment, and if we go to Turkey after all or Engin makes his way back here that will be $900 for the plane ticket if we are lucky which will have to go on the credit card. I lug out the laptop and log on to the banking portal and take stock which is $268 in checking with $176 available after two nights at the Golden Spike.
It is nearing the end of the month and I can assume that the University has not gotten wise to my job abandonment and thus that my full monthly salary is forthcoming on the first which after my mandatory retirement contribution taxes healthcare will be $3,316 which after daycare and rent leaves $516 which is never quite enough for phones and utilities and the food we are all three eating on two different continents and hopefully Engin will get one of his periodic but not totally reliable payments from Tolga et al. And there is the mobile home obviously with its current list price of $80,000 down from $99,900 but it’s not something to bank on although Christ that would be a windfall. I read in the news that some huge percentage of Americans can’t find $400 in an emergency so in the grand scheme of things we are really doing astonishingly well, a thought that both bolsters me at the intimate nuclear family level but demoralizes me at the citizenship human family level. I’d wager some huger percentage of Altavista residents can’t cobble together $400 but then again Cindy Cooper owns her own mobile home and goes to the Golden Spike every Sunday for $4 Picon punch with her lover so maybe she’s sitting pretty, who knows.
It occurs to me now in full force that if I do in fact abandon my job I will lose my gold-plated university health insurance and I conservatively estimate that whatever alternate mechanism I take advantage of if I do not resume the job will be $700 per month if we stay here, and what if one of my dire nighttime imaginings comes true, what if we are sickened or maimed, what then?
I look at the Institute e-mail and see 165 unread e-mails which is actually better than I expected, it is 5:32 a.m. and I could conceivably read through all of these before Honey wakes up. I have the brief and insane idea that I could just work “from home” here in Altavista and not have to pay rent in the City but there are several reasons why that won’t work one being that Hugo would never allow it, he likes to have as many attractive and competent women bustling around his person as possible, and I’m still highly competent at least and Hugo assures me in his ludicrously inappropriate way that I will return to myself as long as I don’t have any other children. Two being Internet which is needed in order to access the VPN that will get me on the network drives. The final and most important thing is Honey because I obviously can’t sit in front of the computer while she just rolls around on the floor all day, although I often stare at my phone while she rolls around the floor. If I am going to work anyway and Honey is not going to have my attention she may as well go back to daycare and I may as well go back to the office and we may as well wash all the bedding and fold it up and sweep the floor and mop it and vacuum the carpet and make Grandma and Grandpa’s bed and tape some cardboard over the soft place on the bathroom windowsill and turn down the thermostat and set the timer on the lights and lock and close the doors behind us.
Or we could go somewhere else. There is something almost sexually pleasing about this thought. I could take thirty-five dollars from the checking and go to Joie de Vivre which is the town’s sole beauty establishment and have my hair washed and blown out and I could moisturize my face with the ancient cold cream in the bathroom cabinet and iron my white blouse and put on Grandma’s jet-black fur coat from Gray Reid’s in Reno circa 1972 and put Honey in her overalls and we could polish up the Buick and hit the road and go somewhere where we will step out and really be somebody.